Vindication or "Why are people so stupid?"
I just had to post this here. I work in the offline niche getting businesses online. However, I do more than that. I do seo and full blown social media campaigns. My company literally acts as an internet marketing department for our clients. So I did a presentation to a business that had actually approached me. I always do a full proposal breaking down the cost and benefit of each individual service we provide. The total package came out to around $5,000 initially and then around $700 a month. This is not a lot for the services I provide. In fact I have shown this to other internet marketers who routinely charge $10,000 or more for the same services and even non internet marketing people have told me I'm insane for charging so little once they see the extensive lists of services.
Back to the story. One of the partners decided to hire me for his personal site but the business itself decided not to hire me. One of the partners had been acting as webmaster and they decided to keep things as they were. Well the webmaster decided to take my proposal as a crash course in seo and decided that she could do better and for less.
So I start working for the partner that hired me and I'm getting really great results. After a month his site and others I did for him are literally dominating the search results on the first 2 pages. But lo and behold the number one site is his company's! I start to think "Am I ripping this guy off? Maybe he doesn't need to pay this much for my services." I really started to second guess myself because I really do want what's best for the client. Well suddenly the site disappears. I chalk it up to the Google dance. Weeks go by and still his company site is nowhere to be found.
Can you see what's coming?
It appears the concepts of keywords and backlinks from my presentation really stuck with the webmaster because she proceeded to keyword stuff her meta tags out the ying yang and bought some service (I don't know what) to get her over 1,000 backlinks in less than a day! I checked out these links and they are on questionable sites at best. I know it's possible to get a lot of links in one day naturally and not be penalized, but this was clearly not natural. Then the site itself is a free flash based site where none of the text is readable because it's all done in flash. Short term the site got a boost from the links, but it didn't take long for Google to figure out something fishy was going on and ban the site.
During this time I was having to chase down payment from my client, but as soon as the site got banned now I'm getting paid early!
Why aren't people willing to pay for quality service? What's more is this is a medical practice for a very lucrative branch of medicine. Why on earth would a doctor think they can do it themselves and do it better? I bet they would think I was stupid if I went in and had one of them explain an operation I needed and then left saying, "Nah, I think I'll handle this myself. You said I just need an incision there and then a laser to take the gunk out. Sounds simple enough, I'll do it myself."
Seo and marketing are distinct skills that I have spent years developing and continue developing. They may not be life and death skills, but they're skills just the same and it really kills me that people undervalue them so much.
Thanks for listening to my vent
Back to the story. One of the partners decided to hire me for his personal site but the business itself decided not to hire me. One of the partners had been acting as webmaster and they decided to keep things as they were. Well the webmaster decided to take my proposal as a crash course in seo and decided that she could do better and for less.
So I start working for the partner that hired me and I'm getting really great results. After a month his site and others I did for him are literally dominating the search results on the first 2 pages. But lo and behold the number one site is his company's! I start to think "Am I ripping this guy off? Maybe he doesn't need to pay this much for my services." I really started to second guess myself because I really do want what's best for the client. Well suddenly the site disappears. I chalk it up to the Google dance. Weeks go by and still his company site is nowhere to be found.
Can you see what's coming?
It appears the concepts of keywords and backlinks from my presentation really stuck with the webmaster because she proceeded to keyword stuff her meta tags out the ying yang and bought some service (I don't know what) to get her over 1,000 backlinks in less than a day! I checked out these links and they are on questionable sites at best. I know it's possible to get a lot of links in one day naturally and not be penalized, but this was clearly not natural. Then the site itself is a free flash based site where none of the text is readable because it's all done in flash. Short term the site got a boost from the links, but it didn't take long for Google to figure out something fishy was going on and ban the site.
During this time I was having to chase down payment from my client, but as soon as the site got banned now I'm getting paid early!
Why aren't people willing to pay for quality service? What's more is this is a medical practice for a very lucrative branch of medicine. Why on earth would a doctor think they can do it themselves and do it better? I bet they would think I was stupid if I went in and had one of them explain an operation I needed and then left saying, "Nah, I think I'll handle this myself. You said I just need an incision there and then a laser to take the gunk out. Sounds simple enough, I'll do it myself."
Seo and marketing are distinct skills that I have spent years developing and continue developing. They may not be life and death skills, but they're skills just the same and it really kills me that people undervalue them so much.
Thanks for listening to my vent
